Three-in-One User Study for Focused Collaboration

Turkka Kalervo Keinonen, Vesa Jääskö, Tuuli Mattelmäki

This article introduces a human-centered design approach, the Three-in-One User Study, which applies a set of methods to speed up and focus on the design process. With a Three-in-One, designers’ face-to-face contacts with users are concentrated into one collaborative designer-user session where preproduced self-documentation material and early design models enable focused collaborative exploration. Three-in-One combines three different complementary points of view to design: users’ subjective interpretations, designers’ focused observations, and design interventions with models. Three-in-One was applied in a kick-bike design case, and it led to improvements to the initial concept, as well as justified decisions for further design development.